My 500th Blog Post

After celebrating turning 30 last week, I thought life couldn’t be more festive, but here I am celebrating again! This is my 500th blog post! Woo hoo!

So how did it all start?

Well, I kept a diary since I learned how to write (or from just before, scribble, scribble) and always loved the act of writing. In 2006 some Swedish friends had blogs, and though I thought blogging was a brilliant forum, I couldn’t really find my own tone or topic. When I got the opportunity to move to Paris, I found myself reading blogs, not books, about Parisian life. I think that spurred the decision to start blogging myself. And then the topic was clear: “Non, je ne regrette rien!”

When moving to Ghana in 2007, the blogging really took off. I wanted to write positively about Ghana and Africa, as I thought most reports from this part of the world was negative and chose the reverse image of a dry desert as my blog name: “Rain in Africa”.

In this post, I thought I’d chronicle my blogging experience with looking back at some of my blog posts.

I had moved to Ghana and just enrolled at the driving school. Some months later I had my licence, still one of my proudest achievements, and I rarely omit telling anyone who wants to hear that “I learned to drive in Ghana!”

“My goal is to sometime next year be able to navigate between goats and Mercedes-Benzes, yellow taxicabs and banana sellers.”

Here I took the first step into professionalizing my blogging. Its a post of the advantages of “going WordPress” and also an interactive piece where I am asking my readers for help. From the header you can also see that I now, thanks to fellow GhanabloggerDavid Ajao, understand how the title of the post should be filled with keywords, rather than just being witty.

“What do you think? Does the name of a blog matter? How it looks? How its posts are categorized? What topics it presents? What URL it has?”

At this time, I had migrated my blog to wordpress and the domain kajsaha.com. When the blog looked as I wanted, I was motivated to write more.

This post reflects that I have added a topic to my blog: academically related texts. This particular one, outlines the Swedish MFS program and my current role within it.

“Back to yesterday afternoon. I first took Emma and Ebba to eat some fufu and drink some bissap at Buka. We talked about everything from clinics to corruption, from surveys to soup, from PhD to perfect beaches.”

A bit more than 5 years of blogging in three countries and 500 posts.

Thanks to all of you who read this blog, thanks for your insightful comments and for stubbornly coming back for more.

10 Responses

Lady VE

February 16, 2011 at 10:40 am ·

I remember one entry so dearly and so clear, I had so many pictures connected to it in my head and could see you performing all the actions you described as I would stand beside you and wath closely. I even could identify myself with the main player and the performed acts and I just loved it, it made me laugh and bring up other emotions. It was certainly not an intellectual post, but made my day, these little red ants around you.

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Natalya

February 16, 2011 at 4:09 pm ·

How do you know you’ve written 500? My favorite one was the Mango Post. Loved it. Made me miss home 🙂

I am planning to own a blog and personal website and i look forward to more coaching.

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Kajsa

February 16, 2011 at 8:04 pm ·

@ LAdy VE Haha, yes that was a brutally honest one! Thanks for reminding me of the ants!
@Natalya, WordPress keeps count for me. Thanks for appriciating the tropical fruits, funny it reminds you of home, so far away from here…
@Michael, I’ll definitely read your blog once it is up, you’ll get your coaching in group sessions when you join GhanaBlogging! 🙂

Hi Rene, From the beginning I was writing instead of emailing family and friends abut my life abroad…it morphed into much more. I love writing and also like to share my opinions with the world. I do not make money directly from my blog, but have gotten some interesting opportunities through it and many many friends which to me is invaluable! Thanks for reading my blog.